Longer, fiercer fire seasons the new normal with climate changes

Firefighters in the West are starting to see it every year: an earlier start to the fire season and millions of acres of forest and range burned or ablaze as the summer just begins to heat up.

At least 60 large blazes are currently devouring parts of the West, threatening to make 2017 a record-breaking wildfire year and adding to the 3.4 million acres already burned this year. As early as April, wildfires had scorched more than 2 million acres in the United States—nearly the average consumed in entire fire seasons during the 1980s. At least 20 new, large fires have ignited in the West in the last days, forcing thousands of people from their homes.

The new normal with climate changes

“All the wildfires out West at the moment—it’s exploding,” said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist in the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It was the same last July, with fires all the way up to Alaska.”

Forest ecologists and climate scientists say this is the new normal—what the fire historian Stephen Pyne has called the “pyrocene”—and recent research has solidly linked it to human activity. A study last year found that human-caused climate change had nearly doubled the amount of forest burned in the West since 1984.

“Dry periods are getting drier, and the risk of wildfire is greater as a consequence of climate change,” Trenberth said. “There’s a tremendous amount of fuel out there waiting for the right conditions. Whatever conditions exists, they’re always exacerbated by climate change. There’s always that heat variable, the increased risk.”

Dry conditions and drought have contributed to huge wildfire seasons over the past decade, including a record-breaking season in 2015 when over 10 million acres burned.

Fire season gets costlier, not just in the West

The expanded fire season stretches from early spring to late fall, and in some areas, even longer. The length of the season, along with bigger, more intense fires, is taxing budgets.

The U.S. Forest Service, which is under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, dedicated half of its budget to fighting fires in 2015, exceeding 50 percent for the first time in its 112-year history. Former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack joked that it should be called the “Fire Service.”

In the West, they used to talk about a fire season,” Trenberth said. “The fire season used to be 60 days, then 90 days, and now they think it’s year-round. There’s no pause.”

The mountainous West isn’t the only area that’s becoming increasingly vulnerable. Earlier this year, nearly 1.6 million acres of forest and grassland burned in the Plains and the Southeast, across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Florida and the Carolinas.

Those blazes came on the heels of an already bad 2016 in the Southeast, where hundreds of thousand of acres burned across Appalachia after an especially dry summer turned forests into kindling. Climate scientists say conditions in the Southeast will likely get worse, largely because forests in that region need more water than those in the West and they’re not getting it. Making matters worse, communities in the Southeast usually aren’t well equipped to battle blazes and are more densely populated.